Wednesday, September 19, 2018

GRU in Germany/EU; 6-3-2018 (or is it 6-3-1918?!?)

5-23-2017 "The GRU feels just as at home today in united Germany as it used to in the former USSR", said Dmitrij Chmelnizki, a scholar of Russian espionage who lives in Berlin.. A previousinvestigation by Boris Reitschuster, a German journalist, published last year, also said the GRU was using systema clubs to recruit agents.It cited a classified report by a Western intelligence service, which said the GRU had recruited 250 to 300 agents in Germany and that the foreign service was surprised the German authorities had done nothing to stop it....

Eerik-Niiles Kross, who used to hunt Russian spies when he led Estonia's security service, the Kapo, from 1995 to 2000, said there were nine systema-type schools whose founders were "all officers of the GRU or KGB-FSB" and whose "intense" foreign expansion in the past 10 years had "no visible natural explanation".

The expansion looked like a "well-thought-out, large-scale operation of the secret services with powerful government funding", he said. The Systema Ryabko school, for instance, has branches in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the UK as well as Germany. https://euobserver.com/foreign/137990

4-21-18 Institute of Modern Security Problems--the clandestine organisation is run by his mother Tatiana, 61, and is said to be an ‘integral part’ of the FSB.…FSB commanders have even blocked access to Moscow authorities who want to interview Mr. Vikeev as part of a Russian probe into the case. …Miss Skripal’s best friend Irina Petrova said she used to complain she was often home alone at night because Mr. Vikeev worked night shifts at a ‘special government organisation.’ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5642691/Yulia-Skripals-mystery-partner-goes-hiding-mother.html

3-10-2018 “I feel a bit shakey. I still sleep badly and cannot get to sleep. But the situation in Russia was even worse,” Kapustin says at first. He says he also feels sad. “I may never return to Russia.”

“More importantly, however, there is no threat to my freedom,” he continues. Kapustin said earlier he was not terribly politically active. Now he can speak more freely because he has left Russia. The connections with terrorism, alleged by the FSB, are absurd. Kapustin has been involved in politics, however. He has been involved in activities opposed to Putin’s regime and the dominant power structures in Russia. https://therussianreader.com/2018/03/13/ilya-kapustin-asylum-finland-iltalehti/

Ilya Kapustin, a twenty-eight-year-old computer programer from St. Petersburg, told me how, on the same night Shishkin disappeared, he was detained by five men in black clothes and masks. They ran up to him near his apartment building in St. Petersburg and, without saying a word, threw him on the ground, put his arms in handcuffs, and tossed him onto the floor of a waiting minivan. They asked about a friend and colleague who had been arrested, in January, on suspicion of carrying low-grade gunpowder, and who only later, this April, was added to the Network case....

The next day Kapustin went to a trauma center where a doctor recorded burns on his body, cuts on his wrists from the handcuffs, and bruises to his shoulders, knees and face. Kapustin told his story to the Russian press and filed a formal complaint against the F.S.B. with Russian investigators. Yet he wasn’t formally under suspicion in the case--he was technically a witness--so he could come and go from Russia as he pleased.

In February Kapustin fled to Finland, a few hours from St. Petersburg, where he asked for asylum. When I spoke with him by phone he was staying at a dormitory and waiting for his application to be processed. Meanwhile back in St. Petersburg investigators rejected his complaint: they ruled that Kapustin had resisted arrest and that the F.S.B. officers were right to electrocute him. In any case the burn marks on his stomach and groin, they said, were actually bites from bedbugs.

The allegations of F.S.B. torture in the Network case are not new for Russian counterterrorism investigations. Last year two brothers, born in Kyrgyzstan, who were arrested in connection with a bombing in the St. Petersburg metro in April, 2017, which left sixteen dead, said that they had been held in a secret F.S.B. prison for several days and tortured. They claimed they were subject to waterboarding, electroshocks and severe beatings. The allegations caused little public outcry or response. “Unfortunately,” Cherkasov told me, many Russians “see a guy with a beard and think he probably wasn’t arrested for nothing.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-network-russias-odd-brutal-and-maybe-invented-pre-world-cup-terrorism-case

6-15-18 "He was to repeat words, names and phrases after the officers and when he failed he was tortured with electric shocks again and again until he repeated exactly what those people wanted from him", Mr Cherkasov said. The names

-Mr. Viktor Filinkov was told to repeat were of a group of men from the small south-western city of Penza. https://news.sky.com/story/russian-intelligence-agency-fsb-accused-of-torturing-suspects-with-electric-shocks-11406132